Dorothy Counts-Scoggins' walk to remember
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A crowd of youth taunts Dorothy Geraldine Counts, 15, as she walks to a previously all-white Harding High School to enroll. She was pelted with trash, small sticks and pebbles. Photo: Getty images
Sixty-seven years ago Wednesday, a 15-year-old Black girl took one of the most consequential walks in Charlotte history.
Why it matters: Dorothy Counts, wearing a bright yellow bow over a red-and-yellow checkered dress her grandmother had hand-sewn, was one of four students to integrate Charlotte's schools that day. White protesters chose her school, Harding High, as the place to show their resistance.
- They crowded around her. They tossed pebbles. A grown woman and parent came up behind the crowd and hollered, "Spit on her, girls! Spit on her!" And they did, soaking that checkered dress.
But the young girl kept walking, remembering the words her father had told her the night before, "Remember who you are; remember that you're inferior to no one; remember that you can be anything you want to be; and don't hold your head low for anybody."
- In the picture above, you can see that she never dipped her head.
- A photo of her ran on the front page of the New York Times the next morning, and author James Baldwin saw it while living in Paris. He later credited it with his decision to move back to the South, writing in a letter to his agent, "Some one of us should have been with her."
The big picture: Dot Counts-Scoggins is now 82 years old and lives in a single-story home near Johnson C. Smith University, just a couple of blocks from where she grew up.
- She's had a few health scares in the past few years, and tons of personal heartache with the deaths of her two brothers and, just this summer, her energetic pup Colby.
- But she's still plenty busy, working as a mentor to students and as an adviser to her neighborhood schools, along with several community projects. And several times a year, she receives interview requests from journalists around the world.
- She stays active, she says, largely to fulfill a lifelong mission born in that moment 67 years ago — to ensure that no child has to endure what she did.
Between the lines: You can take the walk Dot took still today. The old Harding High School is now Irwin Academic Center, and there's a bench there, under the trees, with her name on it in case she ever decides to sit.
Go deeper with my full 2017 Charlotte magazine profile of "aunt Dot" as she's called by so many people throughout Charlotte.
